Jumping on the chance to practice some addition in a ‘natural’ fashion (since she herself brought it up), I then asked:

“What if you have 3 cookies, and then you eat 2 more?”

“That will make 5!”

“What if you have 5 cookies, and then you eat 4 more?”

“That will make 9!”

“This is a harder one… what if you have 2 cookies, and then you eat 6 more?”

“That will make us sick!”

One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that when we need to, we can just take some time.

About a year or so ago, I bought the Life of Fred: Fractions book, much to Flipper’s chagrin.  More math!??  This was an atrocity!

Until I started to read the first chapter to him… and he giggled… and he took the book and read it cover to cover.

Of course you’re not supposed to read it cover to cover in one sitting.  You’re supposed to work through the math in each chapter before moving on to the next.  But it was a good sign that he would enjoy the book, and he was more than happy to read it again, this time stopping to do the math along the way.

Within a few chapters, I was impressed enough that I went ahead and ordered the rest of the books, from Decimals through to high school Geometry.

However, after awhile, things began to bog down.

Flipper has always had difficulty with retention, especially in math.  He will learn a new concept, clearly demonstrate solid understanding of it, successfully complete several lessons on it… and when the concept comes up again a few weeks later, he insists he’s never ever ever done this before and has a meltdown.  It takes a ridiculous amount of re-learning and repetition before something actually, permanently, ’sticks’.

This is why we’ve gone through so many different math programs through the years, often repeating the same “level” in different programs.  Each one is great, but not enough for him to be able to move on just yet.

And so it started with Life of Fred.  Although he had previously done most of the fraction concepts with Teaching Textbooks (I knew he needed more review, which is why I purchased LoF in the first place), it was like he’d never seen them before.  He was starting to have trouble with the “Bridge” unit tests.

At one point, he ‘flunked’ all 5 Bridge options at the end of one unit, and even after attempting them a second time, he still could not get enough correct answers to show he understood what was happening.  In fact, it was very clear that he did not.

So, we put it away.  And we focused solely on the RightStart level E he was already doing.

Fast-forward to this year.  He is now well into RightStart Geometry and loving it.  When we found a massive printing error that required us to wait for a new copy (which they gladly shipped to us at no charge), we decided to start Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra in the meantime, and also to get back into Life of Fred.

Now that I think about it, this Teaching Textbooks was also a “get back into” event.  After having finished TT Grade 6 two years ago, we tried going straight into TT Pre-Algebra, but it was again quickly obvious that he had not retained well enough and it was too ‘dry’ for him.  That’s when we switched to RightStart E in the first place.

This time it was completely different.  The first 25 or so chapters of TT Pre-Algebra have been a piece of cake for him.  Although many concepts which really are review for him still seem to him like “new” concepts, at least he is not getting stuck, nor is he getting frustrated.

And Life of Fred?

Well, today he finished the last chapter, after having sailed through every single Bridge along the way on the very first try.

The Final Bridge, however, was not successful on the first attempt, due to a single repeating error — using the ’shortcut’ for turning a mixed number into an improper fraction, he put the resulting figure in the denominator instead of the numerator.   Now this did result in a meltdown when he realized he’d blown the entire thing, having made this mistake every single time.

But now that he’s done that, I highly doubt he’ll ever make that slip again!

In fact, when he went to bed tonight, he asked if he could work on the Final Bridge second version, so that he could start the Decimals book tomorrow.  And he asked to take the Decimals book to bed with him as well… just in case he did finish the Bridge successfully this time.

All this is simply to demonstrate the value of time.  The value of putting something away and bringing it back later… whether that means after doing practice in other curricula, or just letting some maturing happen.  I really do think that 90% of the difference has been simply the fact that he’s a year more mature, though certainly the RightStart program helped immensely as well.

To do so… to put something away when it is too much right now… is not to admit defeat.  It is not a failure.  In public school, there would be no option.  Each child must march in lock step with the entire class, and if it’s too much too soon, or too fast… too bad.  Any difficulties are indeed perceived as failures.

But at home, we can be more realistic.  It’s not the child that’s at fault.  It’s just not the right time for this program.  You take a break, with no recriminations or disappointments, and you try again later.  We can allow the development that happens with time to unfold at its own pace, and work with our kids where they are rather than where some artificial and arbitrary standard says they ought to be.

Okay, I wasn’t going to get into this whole “Tot School” thing, since we’re not really doing all that much in terms of formal schooling.  But, she did a few really cool things this week, and I know that “Tot School” isn’t supposed to necessarily mean “formal schooling” anyway, so I decided to jump on board and share.  Maybe next week I’ll take more pictures too…

First, art.  I’ve been getting Waldorf-y lately art-wise.  I’ve just read Painting with Children — I’ll post a review of that another time.  I’ve also broken down and ordered Stockmar watercolour paints and some accessories (painting board, paint jars and holder)… We’re still awaiting those, so I decided not to do the typical early Waldorf painting experience, where we would start with just one colour to fully experience it.  Pomme loves drawing great details — even though she’s only 3, she draws people with hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, toes, teeth, clothes… she draws a baseline too, which is apparently very unusual for her age.

So I decided to do a Waldorf-inspired “child copies the parent” painting.  I started with a light wash on part of the paper, for the grass, which she then imitated.  Then another wash for the sky.  Then we added a tree, apples on the tree (using a different brush technique), a sun in the sky, and a few people around the tree, all of which she duly (and most excitedly) imitated!

Here is my finished model:

According to Waldorf art principles, the people are deliberately simple, mere suggestions of people.  Here is her finished work — she had a bit too much water in the tree paint, so it ended up spreading and fading as it dried, obscuring just how amazing her tree looked originally.  But it still looks pretty cool!

Notice that her people are more detailed than mine — she tried to add faces, hair, etc, which didn’t work as well with the thicker paintbrushes, but she refused to just to basic shapes like I had.  The taller person is daddy, apparently, and the shorter one is her.  Then there’s a mere suggestion of a person on the other side of the tree — that’s one of her imaginary friends!

This was such a fun and simple activity.  We’ll definitely do this sort of thing again.

The only other thing we did ‘formally’ this week was math.  We’re working through Right Start level A — nice and slow, she’s only 3!  But she gets it and she loves it, so why not, eh?

So far, she’s learned to recognize quantities up to ten at sight (when grouped as “five and something”), using fingers, objects, tally sticks, or the abacus; instantly count aural taps up to ten; parallel and perpendicular; squares, rectangles and triangles (which she mostly already knew, but didn’t know a square was also a rectangle!); and repeating patterns with up to 4 elements (ie, Red Red Blue Green).

Rather than using the “bead cards” (reproducible in the appendix of the book) as a manipulative, I decided to make Montessori-style bead bars — like the golden bead bars, but using the 5-and-something patterns of Right Start, and using natural wood beads à la Waldorf.  Here’s one finished set:

I’m actually really proud of how these turned out.  I plan to make another post describing how they’re made, with more photos, and a video of Pomme helping!  She instantly recognizes each one, it’s so cool.

This week she did her first official math worksheet, as part of lesson 10.  This was writing tally marks to match the number of objects shown.  She’s only 3, so her writing is not great, but I think it’s darn good for a 3yo… (today she wrote “mom” on her own…)

Ain’t she something?!?

One big change is that I stopped thinking in 6-week blocks a long time ago.  We will be going back into something like that, though, once we get our Waldorf on.  I’ve also been tracking what we’ve been doing with homeschoolskedtrack, which is fantastic, and lets me see at a glance exactly what we did, and when, and what we’re going to be doing, and (approximately) when!

Just for fun, I thought I’d check in and post an update, subject-for-subject in comparison with the March post.  So here we go, seven-and-a-half months later (or about 100 potential “school days”, accounting for occasional summer breaks…) this is how we’ve progressed:

Math

In March, we were at lesson 59 in RightStart level E.  Now we’ve finished lesson 108, and the end is in sight!  If we continue on schedule, we will be finished the level before Christmas and we’ll start Intermediate Geometry in January.  Recent lessons have focused on polygons, angles, and lots of drawing.

Over 100 school days, we’ve only worked on RightStart half the time, apparently.  But I should remember that we took a short break to focus on Life of Fred (which we didn’t have yet last March) and another break for some Math Mammoth extra fractions practice.

Our current math situation consists of RightStart every day, as well as additional practice time on ALEKS and/or Mathletics, both of which we’re trying out to see which one we will stick with.  We love ALEKS but Mathletics seems to be winning right now… Life of Fred is on hiatus just while we drive through the rest of RightStart level E, but he’s waiting patiently and we will have fun with him again soon!

Canadian Studies/Geography

The who the what now?  Oh that’s right, we used to be working on this.  But with so much on our plate, something had to go, and this was one of the somethings.  We will get back into it, probably with a multi-week block at some point.  It’s not gone forever, just not a current priority.

In fact, I’ve just downloaded a nifty learning-geography-through-art e-book (a really MASSIVE one) from currclick… looking forward to drawing from this resource (punny!) soon!

French

We’ve moved on from the oral-only approach we were using in the spring.  I think it did the trick, getting him over his last hurdles and fears about the language.  We had previously finished book 1 and started book 2 of L’art de lire, but took such a long break that he’d forgotten nearly everything.  I ordered fresh copies of books 1 and 2 (we still have all the CD’s and books 3-6) and we started anew!

Last week, we finished book 1 and are currently in the first unit of book 2.  I think he’s picking it up much better than before, and he certainly complains about it less!

While l’art de lire does have a CD, it is primarily a written language program.  So we’ve also added a primarily oral program, continuing the sort of thing I had started with him.  I’ve chosen Ecoutez, Parlez, and I have to say he loves it!  True to Charlotte Mason philosophies, the lessons are short and easy.  He simply repeats the same unit for 9 days, then goes on to the next unit.  He’s even started using some of the phrases he’s learned in everyday situations — a sure sign that it’s sticking!

Literature

This area was fascinating for me to review what we were doing in March, because it has reminded me of some things I should really bring back.  Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost his independent reading time.  He has been reading on his own, of course, but not overly much, and we’ve done virtually no literary narration at all for months.

So I will need to make sure I reincorporate reading time, with assigned books, into his daily rhythm.

On the plus side, though, we’ve maintained and even expanded read-aloud time, where I read to him.  Once we finished “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” we started “The Hobbit.”

This was met with… some resistance.  I think he remembered when I had tried reading The Hobbit to him years ago, when he was really too young and it was a disaster.  This time, he was literally yelling and crying at the thought.  I played the “mean mommy” card and started reading it to him anyway, yelling right over his wails.

Within the first page, he had stopped and was listening, then smiling.  Then begging for more.

In fact, when we finished “The Hobbit”, he begged that we continue straight into “Lord of the Rings”.  A challenging book for an 11-year-old, even if he doesn’t have to do the actual reading himself!

I’m so pleased to say that he’s been loving it.  It’s very slow going, we’ll go days where it’s just descriptions of landscapes, but he doesn’t mind.  He doesn’t mind my attempted renditions of elvish epic poetry.  And he has an astonishing recall of detail.

The party accompanying the ring has just set out from Rivendell and is quickly approaching Moria.  Flipper joked “300 pages in, and the story’s finally getting started!”

Anyway, I’ve also started reading aloud at snack time.  For this, it’s “Watership Down.”  Considering how much he has loved the feline “Warriors” series, I think he’ll enjoy the rabbits.

History

Back in March, I was free-styling my way through Ancient History.  Since then, we dove into History Odyssey – first with the level II free trial, and then (when that proved too much for him, being very new to the subject and a reluctant writer) the level I free trial.

Level I has been going much better — we supplement it a LOT with additional materials, but it’s a good core.  I’m still not sure, though, whether I’ll actually purchase the rest of the program once we’ve finished the free trial materials.  We may just continue on our own, now that I’ve got a better idea of how to go about it.

We have been moving very slowly through Ancient History.  Partly because we had stopped level II and then started over again in level I… but we’re still in ancient Mesopotamia.  That’s okay though, he’s enjoying it and just built a cool model ziggurat!

Science

In March, we were at week 22 of NOEO Biology II but had to backtrack a bit because he hadn’t been doing his summaries.  7 months later, we’ve just finished week 26…

Oy!  We’re taking our time with this.  Most weeks we only do 2 or 3 lessons, instead of the recommended 4.  I think that once we start working in blocks, I’m going to have a NOEO block, to really drive through and finish this thing.

It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy it.  In fact, right now we’re in a unit of building body models which he is having a great time with.  It’s just that it hasn’t been a priority.

We’ve added some other science-y stuff too, such as his Intellego unit study on Whales.  This is by far one of his favourite subjects.  We have a lapbook on Marine Habitats which we will do in the near future, as well.

Once we’re finished NOEO, we’re going to go through Ellen McHenry’s The Elements… then we’ll decide where to go from there.

I think that’s more than enough for one post… Look for part 2, where I’ll discuss what we’ve been doing in Music, Art, Grammar, Poetry, Handwriting, and Miscellaneous.

While all that was going on, on what otherwise would have been his first day of middle school, this was our day:

Slept in until about 8. Took our time having a healthy, hot breakfast.  No rush to get anywhere.  On to the “school day”:

Math: Lesson and practice on finding prime factors, practice on finding equivalent fractions, least common multiples, and adding unlike fractions.

Science:  Lesson on cellular biology.  Lesson on cetaceans, taxonomy of animals.  Watched videos of whales surfacing and free-diving with whales.

Grammar and Spelling:  Two practice pages on spelling rules, sentence combining, direct vs. indirect object, capitalization and punctuation, verbal analogies.  Daily list of 25 patterned spelling words.

Handwriting:  Began a new handwriting program to work with Flipper’s bad writing habits and difficulties — “Italics, Beautiful Handwriting for Children.”  Did the first two lessons.

French:  3 pages of written translations and exercises.

Phys. ed:  Running around outside, doing pushups.

Home ec:  Helping mom with washing walls, doors, and appliances; bringing in garbage and recycle bins; tidying the kitchen, doing laundry, cleaning his room, taking out the compost.

Music:  Practice on his electric guitar.

Poetry:  Tuesday Poetry Tea-Time, sharing cookies and iced tea and reading classic poetry to each other while practicing proper manners and politeness.  Well, mostly.

Reading:  Sitting outside in the sun, reading the latest in his current favourite book series.

Civics:  Watched Obama’s address to American kids online, discussed his reaction to it, and how it related to us in Canada.

All this and lunch too.  Probably about half of his work is independent, I don’t have to be actively “teaching” him or hovering over him for many of his lessons.  And he was finished everything – including “non-school” things like helping around the house, tea-time, and guitar practice – well before the neighbourhood kids were home from school. Total “academic” time was about 3 hours, maybe 3-and-a-half.

For most of the rest of the day, he played Civilization III on the PC, and regaled me with his tales of wiping Germany off the face of the earth (eeps!), learning that Kyoto was not just a misspelling of Tokyo, and finding the natural resources needed for steam locomotives to be developed.

He went snorkeling in the bathtub, helped me put together his schedule for tomorrow (his idea!), and went to bed with no homework and a smile on his face.

Whew!  A productive, happy, interesting day!

While Flipper was doing this, Pomme wanted in on the action too, of course.  She insisted on doing the same handwriting pages as Flipper, so I printed out a page for her too.  Doggone-it if she didn’t start writing beautiful “i’s” and “j’s” and “l’s”, just like that.  Shall I remind you she’s not yet 3?

She also practiced flower arranging, spoon-transfer of marbles, getting herself dressed and undressed (multiple times), emptied the dishwasher, sorted and dealt playing cards, counted on her fingers, watched Totoro again and told us all about it, acted out parts of the story, introduced us to yet another new imaginary friend, helped clean the kitchen, and “read” poetry to us at tea-time.

Now at this point, I should specify that we “do school” year-round, taking breaks and vacations whenever it’s convenient for us.  So sometimes we’re not working when kids are in school, and other times we are working when kids are not in school… which some people think is kind of weird.  But whatever.  That’s the freedom of homeschooling. We don’t have to take two months off just because it’s warm outside (we just move the lessons outside as much as possible!)  So today was not a sudden “first day back to classes,” Flipper has been “working” all summer.

But we don’t do as much over the summer as you might think, since there are summer camps, trips to visit family, gymnastics four days a week, and long lazy days where you just decide that sitting in the sun with your feet up is the most productive way to spend your time.

What did I do today? Other than working with my kids when they needed it, of course, I made cookies for tea-time, started planning fall repertoire for my band, did some laundry, cooked meals, did some gardening, goofed around on the internet, and actually updated my blog!

Homeschooling totally rocks our world.

There were days that we abided strictly to the schedule, eschewed distractions, and were finished everything by noon.  There were days that we scattered ‘lessons’ throughout the day, fitting them in here and there, while doing other things in the meantime.  And there were days when we just said “screw it, we’ve got other stuff to do today” and tried to squish that day’s lessons into the rest of the week as best as we could.  That’s one of the great things about homeschooling, though… that flexibility.

So here we go, subject by subject:

Math

We’re using RightStart Math, on level E.  At the beginning of the session, we were on lesson 39, and ended at lesson 59.   My goal was to end at lesson 65, doing a lesson pretty much every single day.  This means we “lost” one lesson each week. So, I think for the next session, I will only schedule 4 lessons each week and leave on day as a ‘games day’.  We’ve really been neglecting the games, and Flipper really does love them.  I confess that I’d like to get through this level quickly so we can get to Intermediate Geometry, but I really need to take my own advice and not worry about hurrying him through so much.

On the whole, the lessons have gone well.  He still has occasional ’stubborn days’ where he insists that he’s forgotten everything he’s ever learned about math — or insists that he never learned it in the first place — but these are becoming rarer, and by the end of the worst of these lessons he always says “you know what?  That was actually kind of fun!”

He’s learned about area, square feet and yards, mixed and improper fractions, decimals, converting tenths and hundredths from fraction to decimal and vice versa, and metric measurements.  Along the way, he’s picked up squares (and other exponents) and square roots, and order of operations.

Canadian Studies/Geography

We started at lesson 2 and have completed lesson 5 out of the guidebook I’m using for a foundation, just for structure.  Each lesson involves several days of activities and we don’t do this topic every day.  We’re using some of the worksheets from this book and I’m adding in other activities like our Canada Puzzle Map.  I had hoped to be into lesson 6 but I’m happy with this pace.

He’s learned the provinces and territories and their capitals, both in terms of name and location.  He knows the oceans around the country and the postal abbreviations for each province. We also start each week singing O Canada together.   I didn’t do anything formal or grand or even print out the lyrics… I just sang for him!  He now sings along for the entire song in English, then I repeat it in French.  He’s starting to pick up some of the French bits too, and was very interested about the very different meaning of the French version of the anthem!

French

We had previously done some French language curriculum, but it never stuck and we couldn’t keep it up.  So this time around I decided to just forego the curriculum altogether and do what Charlotte Mason suggests — we’d just speak it first.

Flipper is not a boy who enjoys the physical act of writing.  All the written exercises were getting in his way.  It also just makes sense that we learn language first and foremost as a way of speaking, and then only afterwards do we learn to transpose that symbolically onto paper.

We started with reviewing the dozen or so words he already knew and adding a few ‘extra bits’ to make a couple basic sentences.  He already knew all the colour words, for instance.  So I asked him “Quel couleur est-ce que c’est?”, pointing to various things, and he’d answer “c’est rouge” or “c’est noir” or whatever it happened to be.  We didn’t worry about how c’est is a contraction of the pronoun ce and the verb est which is the third-person present conjugation of être… blah blah blah. He’ll figure that out later.

Over the session, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, identify various foods, use comparative opposite adjective (lourd-léger, long-court, grand-petit, etc), and we’ve started singing the avoir and être conjugation songs (to the tune of Mexican Hat Dance, if you didn’t know…)

I can’t believe how much he’s loving this approach.  We spend at most 10 minutes a day and he never complains, in fact he’s excited and keen to show off what he knows.  He especially loves colours and started turning things around, asking me the question “quel couleur est-ce que c’est?” at random times.  Important point:  I never specifically taught him to say that sentence, he just imitated me saying it.

We’ll probably do purely oral french for at least one more session if not two.  Now that we’ve learned the basic verb conjugations, I plan on working in more complete sentences for him.  We’ll learn some animals and some related verbs, maybe things like dormir and courir and manger and marcher…

Literature

Under this heading, I’ve created a list of “great books” that we own, which he hasn’t read yet.  Each day he reads one chapter, more or less, and narrates it to me.  I’ve offered for him to do alternate narration styles, such as drawing a scene or making it in Lego (which, honestly, I thought he’d love), but his preference is always to just orally tell me about it.  He has really, really taken to narration.

First of all, at bedtime I’ve been reading to him from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I don’t officially count this as “school” for him, but we do practice narration.  In fact, we started this before we started the “new” Charlotte Mason curriculum, as kind of a ‘test run’ to see how the style suited him.  Basically, at the end of each reading I ask him to tell me “what happened”, and at the beginning of the next session I ask “now, where were we?”  It’s fascinating to see what he picks up on, what he misses, what he does and doesn’t understand.

For his “official” literature, which he is reading himself, he started with Pippi Longstocking and finished that within a week.  I couldn’t stop him from reading more than he was “supposed” to each day!

So we went to something a bit more challenging  — The Secret Garden.  I had to warm him up to that one by reading to him myself.  I would have happily read the entire book to him, but by chapter two he was hooked and insisted on reading it himself!

When that was finished, we moved on to “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” and that’s where he is now.

I had only expected to finish Pippi and be into The Secret Garden, so in this area he’s surpassed my expectations!

History

As this is the first time we’ve done history formally, we started at the very beginning.  Not in terms of the most ancient history, but just readings about history… Why we learn about history, how historians do their work, and especially, archaeology.

We also started a Book of Centuries and while we’re not yet in a regular routine of adding to it, he was surprisingly keen on the idea.

He already subscribes to Dig magazine which was a great resource in addition to the encyclopedias we’re using as our “core” books.  No real ‘living books’ for history this session, but we’re going to more than make up for that next session – Ancient Egypt!

Science

We’re using NOEO Science, Biology II.  Four days a week, and generally he does this independently.  I had planned to be finished week 23 at this point… looking at his notes, it seems that he’s on week 22, but hasn’t been doing the summaries for the last 2 weeks!  So some backtracking is in order, to make sure he’s actually covered everything.  And I’ll need to keep a closer eye on things next session.

Of the summaries he did in the first few weeks, one especially caught my eye.  He generally does just a short written narration, a couple sentences at most, and a more detailed drawing (one of the reasons we love this science program!)  This particular lesson was about the opossum’s defensive death-faking.  His sketch showed an opossum (with an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘opossum’), a predator looking over it (with an arrow labelled ‘predator’), and a word balloon from the predator saying “I’m not going to eat a DEAD opossum!”

He also did a really cool experiment, digging rodent bones out of an owl pellet.  I actually meant to blog about that, we took a ton of pictures… I’ll have to remember to do that.  It was fascinating.  After he had found and cleaned all the bones, we identified them and glued them onto a skeleton template.  It makes quite a keepsake!

Music

My intention for this session was to focus on Mozart… listen to Mozart every day and read a book about his life.  This got derailed a bit in the second week when the book disappeared, which was a shame because Flipper was actually enjoying it.

Still, we listened to Mozart quite a lot, and talked about some important things about him.  He knows that I’m currently playing the Requiem with the orchestra and that I’ve previously performed it in choirs.  Maybe we’ll be able to get him to come to the concert…

I had also hoped to get him back on track with regular piano practice, but that didn’t happen this session.  He is playing his electric guitar regularly and has started watching some instructional videos on YouTube.  All the same, for the most part he only wants to figure out songs he knows from “Guitar Hero”, and make up his own bizarre nonsense songs, and isn’t responsible about actually learning to play well.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — he actually shows some fantastic innate feel for riffs and patterns with the songs he makes up — and he’s gone so far as to create an entire tracklist for his “debut CD”, recording himself on his MP3 player, drawing the cover artwork, the whole shebang.

So I’m not at all knocking that part of it… it’s just that it’s not enough if he wants to actually get further with it, which he says he does.  He’s going to need to learn to buckle down and do some nitty-gritty practice, not just playing for fun.  One step at a time, I guess….

Grammar

We’re using Daily Grams, grade 5, one page every day.  He’s finished lesson 100, and I had planned to be on 105.  So, like Math, we’ve lost about one lesson per week.  So I’ll probably bring it down to 4 times per week for the next session.  He’s doing fine in this… still has a habit of guessing when he doesn’t know instead of looking a word up in the dictionary or (heaven forbid!) asking me for help, but he’s improved a lot.

Handwriting

Using A Reason for Handwriting, level F.   We fell behind when his book was misplaced for a couple weeks.  I used that as an opportunity to do some more ‘traditional’ Charlotte Mason style copywork, taking selections from his history or literature books, for example.  He didn’t really like that.  He complained that I made the passages too long!

The book was eventually found, and he’s completed week 18.  Hopefully next session will be more on-track.  I think maybe I’ll alternate, a week of Reason for Handwriting followed by a week of copywork from his other books… and I’ll try not to make them too long!

Poetry

Starting in the second week, we’ve been working through a basic poetry-writing manual, doing lessons twice a week.  He’s learned how to write limericks, concrete poems, rainbow poems, and parodies (possibly his favourite!)

We’ve now finished that part of the book, the next part is on writing prose stories.  I gave him the option of continuing with that, or instead, staying with poetry but reading poems (such as A Child’s Garden of Verses).  He’s chosen to write stories, so that’s what we’ll do next session.

Art

We added art appreciation in the fourth week, twice a week.  We decided to start with DaVinci.  I put the Mona Lisa as his desktop picture, but he wasn’t impressed, he wanted his dolphins back!  We looked at a bunch of DaVinci’s paintings and sketches online and chatted a bit about his life and importance.

I had him copy one of DaVinci’s paintings, and he chose “Lady with an Ermine”.  He hasn’t finished colouring it yet… but he enjoyed the project.

In our last week, we found a fun book about DaVinci in our library, a real “living book,” a kid’s story based on real events in DaVinci’s life with large colourful pictures.  It was a very easy read for him, intended for younger kids for sure, but he found it fun and enjoyable.

Miscellaneous

Finally, there are a few various things that we put in once or twice a week.  To work on his logic skills, I schedule a Mind Benders puzzle once a week — though he loves these so much he’ll often do extras on his own time.  He’s now in book A3.

To work on reading comprehension and analysis, he has one Reading Detective lesson per week.  He’s very good at getting the point of a story, but still has trouble with the analysis of where the information came from.

And also on reading comprehension but also with values lessons, he does studies on Aesop’s fables twice a week.  I believe the workbook is called “Christian Values Using Aesop’s Fables.”  They’re short and easy lessons, and he enjoys them.

Whew.  I think that’s it… It really is enlightening to get this all written up, to see just how much we are doing!  Some days we just feel so lazy, it’s good to remind ourselves that overall, we’re more than fine.

In addition to these, I’m hoping to add some journalling and/or dictation next session, or maybe get back into our spelling practice.  I’m really looking forward to the Ancient Egypt studies, though!  I’ve learned more just in preparing for this unit, than I ever learned in school about Ancient History (which is precisely: nothing at all).

Flipper was going to a friend’s house at lunchtime today, so he did most of his schoolwork this morning.  Since we’re following a kind of Charlotte Mason approach lately, most of his work is very short little things… he read a couple pages in an archaeology atlas and told me about them, read a chapter in his new book Island of the Blue Dolphins and told me about it, did a science lesson (NOEO, which involves reading a couple pages then writing a short summary), did a wordsearch puzzle on Canadian provinces and capital cities… really the only thing that is usually time-consuming is his math, and that’s only because he’s so distracted and fidgety it takes forever to get through the lesson.

The warmup wasn’t too bad today, he enjoys the puzzle numbers challenge.  The division facts practice sheet, however, is the big time killer.  He’ll start off with “I don’t know how to do this!!” (he’s known how to do division for at least 3 years), then start saying “what’s 4 divided by 24!!!  That makes no sense!!” (the question is 24/4)… before finally settling in and doing one question.  Rinse, repeat.  Or he stops to talk to his sister, blaming her for distracting him.  Etc etc.

Eventually he gets it done, and we move to the main lessons.  Millimeters today, and writing decimals to thousandths.  We love RightStart, how it has interwoven fractions, percents, decimals, and measurements in a beautiful way showing the interrelationships and having it all make sense.  He’s got it mastered to hundredths so far, and yet when we started by me writing 3.28 and asking him to read it, he said “three twenty-eighths.”  Sigh.  This is the frustrating part, when he knows how to do something but doesn’t stop to think, just randomly starts guessing as though it’s something he’s never seen before.

He did remember pretty quickly this time.  I wonder if the glare of death I shot his way had any accellerative action on his mental recovery.  I’m a good mommy.

The lesson itself went fine after that, he already knew that there were 10mm in 1cm, and 1000mm in 1m, so all seemed fine.  Until the first question on the worksheet… it asks to shade in on a picture of a ruler: one dm, plus one cm, plus one mm.  No problem, quickly done.  Then it asks how many mm that is.  He looks at it and starts thinking out loud… “let’s see… 10 hundred and…”  What?  Ten hundred?  Okay, how many mm are in a cm?  “A hundred!”  What?

Glare of death to the rescue again.  I’m a very good mommy.

Finally, he was set to finish the worksheet on his own and I went to do some housework, telling him to come get me when he was done.  It was not more than 10 minutes later he came to me, completed math in hand, cheery and chipper, saying “That was actually fun!!”

Oy vey.

I’m looking forward to the day when he remembers that he finds math fun before the lesson starts, rather than not until close to the very end.  Because this happens Every. Single. Day.

Anyway.  The other schoolish tasks on the schedule today were postponed until after he got back from his friend’s.  So we had a french lesson at suppertime — right now I’m just doing oral french with him for at least a few months, building up vocabulary and ease, before starting over with L’art de lire.  We had previously got into book 2, but it wasn’t “sticking” for him and it was torturous.  I believe that with a confidence in the basics of the spoken language already under his belt, all that writing will be less intimidating.

So far, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, all the colours, how to say “I love to play the guitar”, a few foods, and some adjective opposites (thick/thin, big/little, tall/short, heavy/light).  He likes doing it this way, and especially the “big” numbers like 97, which literally translates to “four twenties and seventeen”.  Gotta love it.

Finally, his poetry-writing book had him writing a popcorn poem today, so he suggested we make some tonight and he would recite it to us, which we did, and he did.  Grandiose as all get-out in his delivery.  It was a silly little poem and missed the point of it being an exercise in sensory description (how does popcorn feel, smell, look, etc)… It was more like instructions on how you yourself could pretend to be popcorn by curling up into a ball then jumping up high.  But… coming from a hyperkinetic kid, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

What we didn’t get done today… his cursive, because he couldn’t find the book.  Daily Grams, because he’s done 10 pages since I last checked it so now I have to check it and tomorrow we’ll review any glitches.  And a few things that weren’t on the schedule for today… logic puzzles, Aesop’s fables, art, music.

Flipper has been asking about pi quite a bit recently… he wanted to know what it was, what it meant, and he wanted to know how far I had it memorized.  (3.1415926 is all I have now, but in my prime (prime!  math pun!) I had probably a dozen digits more)

So I thought he might be excited to celebrate today.  His reaction when I told him?  “But I don’t really know what pi is.”  *sigh*  He was at his father’s today to boot, so I couldn’t even organize a variety of pi-themed activities to show him more about what pi is all about anyway.

But, I baked a pie.

Last fall, I froze a half-dozen pies, several apple and several blueberry, as a bit of an experiment.  I wanted to find out if I could make fresh pies with fresh, local fruit for the filling, freeze them, and have them turn out edible a few months later.  I’ve VERY pleased to say that the experiment was a complete success.  They have been scrumptious.  Today, in fact, I baked the last one of the pies, an apple pie put together with hand-picked apples from hubby’s historic family cottage/riverfront/camp down near Saint John.

It was yummy.  And since it was baked in a 9″ pie pan, the circumference was 9×3.1415926, or about 28-1/4″, and the area was 3.1415926×4.5^2, or about 63-1/2 sq in.

According to her, the one on the bottom is a cat, the one at the very top is a pig, and the rest are whales.  The spots are eyes.  She has labelled her drawings before (usually as whales lol), and she has drawn circles, spots, and lines before.  The new thing this week was deliberately making spots to represent eyes, using different drawing techniques to represent different parts of a whole.

She has also started to be able to trace shapes within a stencil.  I’d love to get the set of Montessori metal insets for this purpose, but can’t really afford them right now.  For now, I picked up a $1.50 wooden craft frame with an oval shape (which you can see in the picture), and we also use Flipper’s drawing tools triangles.

She loves to use Flipper’s dry erase board, and that’s fine by me.  It’s easy to clean the dry erase marker if she ‘misses’ the board, and she can erase and do it all over again, getting lots of drawing practice without leaving mountains of scribbled paper.

One Montessori item we did invest in was a set of wooden place value number cards.  I had initially put them out of her reach, because she’s not really ready for those kinds of math concepts yet.  But she found them and took them down and has been happily playing with them for weeks.  She sorts them by size and colour, identifies what digits she recognizes (for instance, she’ll say “one zero zero zero” for the one thousand tile), and practices putting them away:

We haven’t “instructed” her on anything with these, she has created all her own activities with them.

In fact, just after this picture was taken of her putting them away, I turned my back to her to focus on the stove and dinner.  When I turned back again a few minutes later, I assumed that I’d see them all put away, or perhaps taken out again to repeat putting them away.  What I saw instead, was this:

How cool is that?

Anyway, as I said, she likes to identify what digits she knows so far.  She has a wooden number puzzle which has pictures under the digits.  For instance, there are four dogs under “4″, seven hippos under “7″, etc.  At first, she would solve the puzzle just by fitting the shapes, but soon made the association with the animals.  She would pick up the puzzle number “7″ and say “hippos!!”  One exciting day (exciting for me as a proud mama), she saw a number 7 in a completely different context, just a regular printed digit 7, and very enthusiastically said “hippos!!”

Ah, the first step… the recognition that this particular shape, or symbol, represents something.  It didn’t really matter that she hadn’t yet made the connection with the symbol and the concept of quantity.  What mattered was the concept of symbol itself, of one thing standing for something else.  And what’s more, this 7 did not look exactly like the one in her puzzle, which is slightly cartoonish.  So she was recognizing that it was not the size, or the colour, or style, or the wooden-ness, or the texture of it that mattered… it was the basic shape itself.  Very, very cool indeed.

We haven’t done anything to “correct” her animal associations.  All we do is add to it… when she says “hippos!” for 7, we say “yes, seven hippos.”  Over time, she is picking up on this concept and has now substituted the real number name for most of the digits.  She identifies 0, 1, 5, and 7 consistently, 4 most of the time, sometimes mixes up 8 and 9, or 6 and 9, but she’s got the idea.

We have another set of smaller place value cards, that I made myself for Flipper before deciding to buy the wooden set.  She loves to pull them out of the baggie they’re stored in and sort them, and label the digits she knows.  As you can see in this video, she still uses the animal association for some numbers:

So that’s it! A week in the life of an unschooling, self-determining, Montessori-inspired 26-month old.

My reply garnered an “excellent post” response… so I thought I’d clean it up a bit and offer it here as well.

Here’s a worst case scenario.

You were unschooled and never learned division.  Now you’re 25 years old and you find that there’s something you can’t do because you need to divide some numbers.

You’re probably already recognizing that this is a pretty unlikely scenario, to make it to 25 years old and to have never encountered a situation where you’d have to figure out how to divide something.  But this is, as I said, a worst case scenario.

So, just for the sake of argument, you’re 25 years old and you realize that you have to divide something. You’ve never done it before.  Now think about this… Do you really think you’re not going to be able to figure it out, to learn how to do it now?

Or do you think that you’ll just open up an elementary math textbook, or ask someone who knows, and learn how to divide in like 10 minutes?

Yeah, I thought so.  Voila, problem solved.

One of the biases we all have to overcome as homeschooling parents, because most of us were traditionally schooled ourselves, is the notion that children must be carefully fed bite-sized bits of information, little by little, in carefully graduated and incremented portions, and this must be done at certain ages and in a certain prescribed sequence. Or else…

Or else what?  “Or else they never will learn it” is the unspoken conclusion.  But that’s just illogical.  The real answer is “Or else they learn it later.”  And learn it faster, and all in one go rather than spread out in tiny bits over years, because their brains are now more mature and because they have the self-motivation to want to learn it now.

There’s a great difference between “learning” something because it’s being fed to you in a classroom, and regurgitating on a test, for the purpose of attaining a passing grade… and learning something because you want to know more about it, because you have an interest in it, or because you need a particular skill to accomplish a particular task.

When you stop and think about it, how much of what you “learned” in elementary school has actually stuck with you?  I know I can remember about a half-dozen things from grade one:

• “Ça va très bien merci et toi?”
• French for crutch is “béquille”
• “Le bon roi Dagobert a mit sa culotte a l’envers”
• Our gym teacher could make a hula hoop roll backwards.
• French for ladybug is “coccinelle” and they drink dew off the rose petals and we made puppet masks and took turns playing the different parts in this cute little play about it.
• Véri-tech puzzles are awesome, they make cool patterns.
• I loved Rémi et Aline books.

And…. that’s about it.  My memories from grade two at least include a few “academic” things but they are just as scanty:

• I learned about < and > and they were graphically demonstrated on the wall as the mouths of alligators.
• We played a dictionary game where we’d have to look up a word and race to the blackboard to write down the page number.
• We learned about multiplication and I was humiliated that I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.
• I loved Dinomir books.
• French for “factory” is “usine”, I learned that from a 2-part puzzle card.
• I listed very definitely which boys in the class I would marry and which were just yucky.
• I played Santa Claus in the class Christmas play and got my picture in the paper and had to bring in ice skates to use as prop presents.
• Our music teacher was awesome, he’d turn around and play the piano with his butt during “Trois petits chats” which would get me laughing so hard I couldn’t finish the song.
• I actually probably remember more just from music class — all the french folk songs, etc — than from the rest of the years’ “subjects” combined.

You’d be hard-pressed to say that those were all essential skills and knowledge that, if neglected or delayed, would have imperiled my eventual success.  I did have some fun times, but I did not learn anything that I could not have learned equally well — or better — later.

There’s a famous case, where formal math was not taught to an experimental group of students until grade 6.  Instead, they read, wrote, and talked, and any math was incidental and in context.  When they started formal math in grade 6, they were completely caught up to the “control group” kids within 4 months.  And all of that time which the “normal” kids had spent working on math lessons, assignments, homework, and problems for six years, the “experimental” kids had spent reading, writing, and thinking.

So there’s my first major point.  Delaying the teaching of a particular concept until a child is developmentally able to understand it more easily, will not irreversibly handicap them forever. Even if they do not end up learning this particular fact or skill until adulthood, they will still be able to learn it.  Did you stop being able to learn new things when you left school?  So why do we fuss and fret and worry that our children will be utterly helpless if they don’t learn everything when they are still very young??

Here’s another major point. Yeah, an unschooled kid might end up with “holes” in their education. But find me just ONE public schooled child who does NOT. All kids have some holes, they’re just in different places. If a child has a love of learning and self-motivation and has learned HOW to learn, then as they uncover their holes they will fill them. A child who has only been passively ’spoonfed’ factoids and test-fodder might not.

After saying all this, of course I must say that unschooling isn’t the best fit for all families. We ourselves are hardly radical unschoolers.

But I will say this — I know of more cases of families who started off doing strict “school at home” curriculums, who gradually over time, as they gained the wisdom of experience, became more eclectic, relaxed, child-led and “unschooley”… than those who start off as radical unschoolers and added more and more curriculum. Of course the latter does happen, especially as kids get older and more mature and start wanting to enrich their knowledge in a more structured way — but just from my own anecdotal observations, it’s far less common.

I would venture to say that the majority of homeschoolers (again just my anecdotal observations) are eclectic, with lots of unschooley-child-led stuff (I’ve recently heard this called “rabbit trails”), but with a few curriculum-based subjects for whatever areas they personally felt were too important to leave to “chance” or did not believe their children would take to on their own, etc.

And that’s what we’re like, in fact. I do a certain amount of planning and guiding for “core” subject work, even more carefully planned lately as we’ve shifted into some Charlotte Mason-inspired ideas.  I have learned that my son lacks inner motivation and drive, he does need a minimum amount of structure. But it’s just ‘minimum’… beyond the few things that I structure, the rest of the time is his own, and he learns just as much that way too.

I’m trying to ensure he has a good, broad foundation to build upon… but I’m not stressing about the “holes.”  We all have holes.  I still have holes.  He already knows more about dolphins and whales than I ever did.  As we’re gearing up for a couple sessions on Ancient Egypt and Greece, I’m learning just as much as he is… I certainly never learned that stuff when I was a kid.  Even as an adult my knowledge is limited to a few Discovery Channel specials and “Stargate SG-1″.

Final moral:  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  And elementary curriculum?  It’s all small stuff.